Knowledge 2.0 – Social Media Policy and Process Tips

If you aren’t already on the social media bus, you’re probably thinking about it. If you are using social media as a tool for your business, are you using it effectively?

Web 2.0 is the term given to web-based apps that encourage information sharing, such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and so on. Let’s take Twitter, for example. If you’re proactive in monitoring user experience and managing complaints, Twitter can become a valid mechanism of your service management model, just like the telephone, email and other customer contact methods. Social media gives you a way to access the conversations your user community is having, simply by searching for your product or business name. If they’re complaining or sharing ideas and you’re listening, you have a chance to fix those things or build on those ideas. I like to call it Knowledge 2.0.

All you need to do is monitor and respond to your Twitter mentions. That’s straightforward if you’re a sole operator, but for medium and big business the company Twitter account will typically be managed by the marketing team. But what then? Responding to operational issues reported by users over Twitter and collecting that community knowledge for later reference is simpler than it might seem. Building social media into your existing service management process provides your social media/marketing team with the authority to act on operational issues, when it doesn’t traditionally occur within their domain, and the ability to retain the relevant conversations in existing knowledge bases.

Here’s a suggested workflow.

The process above ensures good customer service but it also means capturing those interactions in the normal service desk environment. A similar process can occur for adding crowdsourced knowledge to your knowledge management system, but rather than logging a fault and responding to the user, outline that user experience as a new knowledge base article so that you can refer to it later.